Guru seeks boy-band resurgence

behind the song

Decades after his greatest successes, Maurice Starr dares to dream big about a comeback featuring 3 pop groups he wants to create.

January 21, 2007|By Jim Abbott, Sentinel Pop Music Critic

DeLAND---When Maurice Starr was the impresario behind New Edition and New Kids on the Block, he used to wear Sgt. Pepper-esque military garb and call himself the "general."

That was more than 20 years ago, but old soldiers never die -- and in Starr's case, they don't fade away, either. His brightly colored officer's tunic is gone, but the producer, promoter and songwriter remains.

FOR THE RECORD - ********** CORRECTION OR CLARIFICATION PUBLISHED JANUARY 27, 2007 **********An article on Page F3 of Sunday's Good Living section about music producer Maurice Starr contained an incorrect e-mail address to reach him. The correct address is mauricestarrent@aol.com.****************************************************************************

At 53, he's ensconced in a 10,000-square-foot, eight-room brick mansion, the biggest house in an exceedingly modest neighborhood just west of Woodland Boulevard in this tiny college town. It's not the bad section of town, but you can see it from here.

Inside the house that DeLand native Maurice Starr built for his parents in 1990, there's a 56-track recording studio and an elevator to the second floor, an accessory added for his father, who died six years ago.

Starr lives there now with his mother, a truckload of gold and platinum records and new aspirations to bring boy bands back yet again -- and make a positive difference along the way.

His first project is to launch another New Kids. He wants to call this new band Heartbeat, and he's looking for talented singers ages 9 to 12. He welcomes anyone interested to submit MP3s, publicity photos and bios to mauricestarr@aol.com.

Like New Kids, the new group will have five singers. Why five?

"The Beatles only took four, but not everybody's fortunate enough to be the Beatles," he says. "Unless you're Elvis Presley, you need five."

After Heartbeat, which will be built around white singers in the New Kids mold, Starr will set his sights on starting a new gospel-oriented group and another New Edition, both featuring black performers.

"It's the perfect time," Starr says about the prospects for teen pop's return. "There's nothing out there like it. It's wide open."

The father of boy bands

Without Starr's influence, there would have been no 'N Sync, no Backstreet Boys, no Britney or Christina. Lou Pearlman, the force behind Backstreet Boys and 'N Sync, was flying New Kids around on his charter airline when he decided to get into the music business.

"He gave me the idea to start Backstreet Boys," Pearlman says now. "He's a very good musician and singer, a very talented guy. Very persistent and very, very soft-spoken."

The latter trait seems to fit with Starr's low-key presence in DeLand. When a guest arrives on a recent afternoon, he answers the door in a long bathrobe, with shaving cream on his face. He's running a little late, so make yourself at home.

His home studio is laden with accolades: a Billboard award for being 1989's songwriter of the year; a platinum record for New Kids' "Hangin' Tough," among others. The plaques sit on the floor because Starr hasn't found time to hang them on the wall.

He had a hand in more than 700 gold and platinum recordings, which, as he likes to point out, is a lot more than Diddy.

"I just don't dance in everybody's video."

`2 albums in a day'

Although Starr took a brief shot at becoming a star in his own right, it wasn't to be. Yet it wasn't because he didn't have talent.

Growing up in DeLand, the youngster who would become Maurice Starr went by his given name, Lawrence Johnson. He took to music at an early age, emulating his mother, a church organist, and his father, Ray Vernon Johnson Sr., a jazz trumpeter who played with Count Basie and Lionel Hampton.

In junior high school, Starr was teaching high-school students how to play everything from tuba to saxophone. After graduating from DeLand High School, Starr demonstrated that ease composing catchy New Edition hits such as the group's 1983 breakout "Candy Girl" in the mold of his favorite group, the Jackson 5.

"He's an absolute genius," says ex-New Kid Jordan Knight, now 36. "He does take a lot of pride in being able to write a song pretty quickly, and that's what makes the songs that great, really great. He doesn't have the paralysis of analysis. It's just free-flowing, straight from the heart."

Even now, Starr doesn't pretend that writing hit songs is a laborious process.

Sitting at an electric keyboard in the studio control room, he plays a snippet of a new song, "I Like the Rain," a lovelorn sentiment framed by a hooky falsetto chorus and rap elements:

"I could write two albums in a day," he says, still managing to sound modest. "It never was hard for me."